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Wednesday, April 27, 2016

ISIL is a nuisance, not a global strategic threat

John Kerry appears to have lost some of his perspective on the problem of
terrorism over the past decade. During his 2004 run for the White House against
incumbent President George W Bush, Kerry spoke of the need for America “to get
back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but
they’re a nuisance … something that you continue to fight’’. But, last week, as
the Obama administration convened an international Summit on Violent Extremism,
Kerry wrote that “the rise of violent extremism represents the pre-eminent
challenge of the young 21st century”.

The 2004 comment was a sensible rebuke to the hysteria whipped up in Washington
in the wake of the September 11 attacks. In the intervening period, Osama bin
Laden has appeared on cover of Time magazine nine times – that’s three more
Time covers than Hitler got for starting a war that killed upwards of 60
million people. Al Qaeda is unlikely to have killed much more than 10,000. The
eighth of those nine covers showed Bin Laden’s face covered with a large red X,
preposterously repeating a device the magazine had used to mark Hitler’s death
in 1945.

Today, it is ISIL that dominates the discourse of fear that Washington wants to
reframe global priorities. It’s more than a little absurd to suggest that ISIL
represents the “pre-eminent challenge” of the 21st century to the US, much less
to the planet as a whole. Consider ISIL’s impact against that of climate
change, poverty, disease, wars in Ukraine, Syria and across Africa and it
emerges as, well, a nuisance. A nasty nuisance, which has killed thousands in
the Middle East, but a nuisance nonetheless. Nuisances have to be dealt with,
of course, but the tragic lesson of George W Bush’s war on terror is that
elevating a nasty nuisance to the status

of a global strategic priority is a mistake. Of course, the Obama
administration is not talking about a war on ISIL.

The US involvement in fighting ISIL is largely confined to airstrikes, and the
talk of a “coalition” of upwards of 40 countries is fatuous. Most of those
confronting ISIL on the ground remain driven by their own strategic agendas.
There’s very little strategic interest binding together the governments of
Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Syria, for example, all of whom are involved in
fighting ISIL.

But there’s a conceptual continuity between the era of Bush’s “war on
terror” and Obama’s countering violent extremism (CVE) campaign. The
continuity lies in the idea that small groups of people can become a national
security priority by the dissemination of video imagery depicting grotesque
acts of violence.

It was the dramatic live feed and endless looping of September 11 videos that
created the narrative in which Bin Laden, leader of a small band of desperadoes
numbering fewer than 1,000 men, could be seen by Americans as a threat on a par
with Hitler.

In his closing address to the CVE summit, Obama highlighted “more than
238 years” of American resilience as it “surmounted challenges that might have
broken a lesser nation”. These included the civil war, the Great Depression,
the Second World War and the challenge of communism. Somehow, he segued from
these epic challenges to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, September 11, the
Boston Marathon bombing, various small-scale acts of racist violence in
America, and the recent attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, Paris and Copenhagen. “I’m
confident,” he said, “that, just as we have for more than two centuries, we
will ultimately prevail.”

Prevail over what? There’s no strategic challenge here. It requires a singular
lack of perspective to put the actions of the marginalised individuals who
executed attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, Paris and Copenhagen on a par with such
epoch-shaping events as the Depression, the Second World War II and the Cold
War. But it’s worth remembering that ISIL burnt its way into the US public
conversation via the videos of the beheading of American journalists James
Foley and Steven Sotloff.

Turning hideous criminal deeds into viral video clips has allowed ISIL to
displace Bin Laden as an entity to fear. (When Ebola threatened to jump the
Atlantic to US shores last year, CNN labelled the virus the ISIL of “biological
agents”.)

The Foley and Sotloff videos created the pressure that prompted Obama to
launch air strikes against ISIL and deepen the focus on CVE. Former Florida
governor Jeb Bush and his fellow contenders for the 2016 Republican
presidential nomination have made clear that ISIL will be a central theme on
the campaign trail. And many of them are blaming Obama and potential
Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for the group’s rise. s Clinton, for her
part, says ISIL has flourished because Obama failed to heed her advice to
arm Syrian rebels. Americans go to the polls next year facing socio-economic
challenges that were until recently on a par with those of the Great Depression
era. And their candidates will be arguing about ISIL, a phenomenon that barely
touches the lives of most Americans. But there’s a nationalist current at work
in much of US political discourse in which no challenger is too small to be
treated as an existential threat. (Americans were really led to believe that
Saddam Hussein could attack the US mainland!)

Don’t forget, John Kerry may have offered sensible perspective on terrorism in
2004, but he was mercilessly pilloried for it on the campaign trail – and he
lost the election.